Ethernet technology has become ubiquitous in local area networks (LANs) of many businesses and residences. In increasing numbers, service providers and carriers are offering Ethernet services to their customers, and transporting service traffic over connection-oriented and connectionless networks. Examples of connectionless packet-based networks include Ethernet LANs and Internet Protocol (IP) networks (e.g., the Internet). Connectionless networks pose a difficulty for service providers to appropriately price their offered services, in part because the actual routes taken by individual packets of the service traffic are unknown.
In connectionless networks, the transmission of packets between nodes does not require previously establishing a communication path between the nodes. Packets are individually routed to their destination through the network over a best route (based on a routing algorithm). Conceivably, packets traveling from the same source node to the same destination node, whether part of the same or of different messages, do not necessarily follow the same route through the network. The destination node reassembles the packets into their appropriate sequence to produce the message.
The inability to know beforehand the routes taken by the packets makes it difficult to predict with any significant precision which particular network resources will handle the service traffic. Consequently, service providers are unable to predict, with much certainty, their cost for carrying service traffic for specific services. Often the pricing of their Ethernet and IP services is not directly related to the costs for handling the service traffic. Service providers are, therefore, searching for a mechanism that helps them price their Ethernet and IP services appropriately, especially for their connectionless packet-based networks.
One common pricing technique is to charge according to supported bit rate for the service. A variation of this technique is to charge by the number of transmitted packets (or octets) of the service as counted by a node in the network. Although these techniques provide a basis for pricing services, they neglect to consider the network resources necessary to deliver the packets to their destination. For instance, transmitting two million packets across a city uses far fewer network resources than transmitting the same number of packets across a continent. Counting packets, by itself, ignores distance, and thus does not provide an accurate valuation of the true cost to support the service.
Moreover, these techniques do not enable network management to properly design (i.e., engineer) the network to support the service. Whereas counting packets gives an indication of the capabilities needed by a particular node to support the service, the route taken by individual packets associated with a service is effectively unknown. From bit rate and packet counts alone, service providers are unable to deploy network resources cost-effectively for carrying the service traffic to its destination.
Another variation of this counting technique is IP filtering. Nodes employing IP filtering count packets and can block packets from passing therethrough based on IP addressing of the packets. To use IP filtering to account for distance, however, service providers need to associate different IP destination address with different distances. Implementing IP filtering is therefore difficult to engineer, in particular in large networks having thousands of nodes and other network resources. Thus, there is a need for a system and method that enable service providers to more predictably associate costs with their offered services so that they can more cost-effectively engineer their networks and price their services.